Kanye West's Mother Dies
Physician, Heal Thyself
As attorneys who represent the injured, we often find ourselves in direct opposition to insurance companies, tort reform organizations, and HMO’s.
There aren’t many subjects on which we agree. We believe that those who have been injured due to the incompetence or negligence of others deserve full compensation, and they believe that there should be strict limits on what sort of damages the injured can recover. We believe that the rights of Americans to access the court system should not be limited in any way, while some believe that sort of freedom is bad for business. We believe that the primary goal of an insurance company should be to honor the needs of their policyholders, while they treat the ill as though their needs come a distant second to honoring the needs of their stockholders.
There is, however, one subject upon which we do agree. Insurance companies, tort reform organizations and medical professionals believe that there is a real problem in this country involving medical malpractice. We believe that as well. But their contention is that the problem centers on the victims, while our position is that the problem comes from the doctors, nurses and medical professionals who don’t do their jobs properly.
If you take a look at your average tort reform web site, you will find page after page of reports and statistics that tell you about high insurance premiums, so-called “frivolous lawsuits,” and trial lawyers who are inevitably described as “greedy.” But you won’t find much about the actual doctors who are being sued.
Medical malpractice lawsuits happen for a reason. Perfectly healthy people don’t walk into our office and announce that they would like to sue their doctor. A medical malpractice lawsuit happens when there are real damages that come from real professional negligence by medical providers. So we find it strange that these organizations rarely acknowledge that doctors make preventable mistakes, that people suffer as a result, and that the medical system as currently designed by self enforcement allows some doctors with extremely shoddy records to keep practicing medicine. As far as we are concerned, that’s the heart of the medical malpractice “crisis.”
Bad Doctors, Not Bad Law
11/11/2007: Donda West, the mother and onetime manager of rapper Kanye West, died Saturday in Los Angeles. BBC News quotes her publicist as saying she passed away "as the result of complications from a cosmetic surgical procedure," but gave no more details. West's spokesman said the family "asks for privacy during this time of grief."
The doctor who performed the surgery was named Jan Adams, who was something of a celebrity in addition to being a plastic surgeon. He had appeared as a panelist on a show called The Other Half, which was a sort of an all male version of The View. He had also set himself up as a go-to medical issues pundit for news programming, appearing on CNN, ABC, and NBC, and he was also featured regularly on the Discovery Channel. Mr. Adams is a pretty good looking guy, and comes across as charming and personable.
But he apparently wasn’t a very good surgeon.
Prior to his operation on Ms. West, Dr. Adam’s had been named in a series of separate medical malpractice lawsuits. The complaints involved a sponge left in during surgery, lack of informed consent, and professional negligence and fraudulent misrepresentation. There is also a rather unsettling history of DUI arrests, as well as allegations of abuse. Yet after all of this, Dr. Adams was only required to surrender his license to practice medicine in March of this year, which is almost a year and a half after Ms. West died after surgery and several years after multiple lawsuits and run-ins with the law.
It often takes a high profile example of a systemic problem to bring that problem to the attention of the general public. The case of Dr. Adams and Ms. West led many people to ask why he was still able to practice medicine after years of poor performance and erratic and irresponsible personal behavior. We believe that Dr. Adams was only one example of the medical profession as a whole failing to police itself.
A 2003 article from the Virginian Pilot describes in graphic detail how lax the standards are with state medical boards, using statistics from the National Practitioner Data Bank as examples. In the article, author Liz Szabo notes that there are hundreds of doctors in Virginia alone who still have their licenses, even after episodes of gross incompetence and criminal convictions, up to and including murder. If a state medical board is hesitant to revoke the license of a Norfolk doctor who murdered his wife, as the article states, it seems less of a surprise that someone like Jan Adams was still practicing even after multiple lawsuits, settlements, judgments and arrests.
The argument for such low standards is essentially that since it takes so much time and money to earn a medical license, state medical boards are willing to offer multiple chances to doctors who make mistakes. In fact, nurses are held to tougher employment standards then doctors. While we realize that even the most competent and professional of doctors can make errors during the course of treatment, it is clear that the standards need to be improved. You have to wonder what the outcome would have been for Ms. West had the California medical board taken action against Dr. Adams when it became clear that there was a problem with his competence.
It is dishonest of tort reformers to make it seem like the problem is just the court system. The idea that the medical profession is the blameless victim here does not hold water. And we fail to see how limiting the victims’ access to the courts while bad doctors are allowed to keep practicing will solve anything.
If you or a loved one Maryland, Virginia or Washington DC has been injured due to the actions of a doctor or other medical professional, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.
If you want to learn more about medical malpractice issues please read our medical malpractice page. If you want to learn more about our medical malpractice lawyer, please read about John Sellinger, or watch his medical malpractice video on UTUBE.
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